I’ve been waiting for a rainy day to tell you about this bread, and though today fits the quintessential dreary, wet spring day, I am a bit ashamed I’ve waited so long to share. I’m sure you all are familiar with the concept of no-knead bread, the kind that prefers to let bread get its crackly crust and incredible flavor from the tiniest smidge of yeast and a long, slow fermenting rise. I hail Jim Lahey as the king of this wondrous feat, I mean, us moms over here don’t have spare time to intensely knead bread for our dinner everyday. This concept is a game changer. It’s been insanely popular on the blogosphere for the last 7+ years, but today I would like to present my riff on the classic: a no-knead loaf filled with caramelized onion goodness and gooey pockets of goat cheese — I’m clearly not subtle when it comes to the things I like, cough, caramelized onions and goat cheese, cough.

Regardless of how un-hands-on no-knead bread might be, it still does take some foresight to plan out. When I mentioned above that a no-knead loaf needs a long, slow rise, I’m talking 24-hours. Lahey’s recipe calls for an 18-hour rise, so for those thinking I’m trying to kill you with an extra 6-hours, well, I’ve got your back. 18-hours is an odd length to time-out. When to start making the bread, and then letting it slowly rise, making sure you factor in enough time for the quick second 15-minute rise as well as bake time so that everything can be prepared and ready to eat when your husband steps through the front door ready to get his chow on. (Just to be realistic here, men should give you extra brownie points your house now smells like an angelic bread revival when he steps inside regardless of how “on time” or not your bread might be. But I digress.) 18-hours, whether you work out of the home or in the home can be challenging to time perfectly so I stretched it out, after all, isn’t the long rise where this bread grabs hold of its shekinah glory?

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The first family Easter dinner I brought my husband to we dined on lamb. I guess you could call it tradition, we eat it every Easter, though I never gave it much thought until my newly made husband balked on the ride to my parents house over the sacrilege of eating lamb on the very day celebrating the resurrection of…the Lamb of God. At nineteen I just shrugged. It didn’t bother me a bit, or even occur to me to make the connection. To me, it was the only time each year I got to feast on a lamb dinner and I was not about to have my husband and his teasing accusations interfere.

Besides, the joke was on him. No sooner did he get over his mockery of my family’s blasphemy and shimmy a piece of roasted meat on his plate than he got wide eyed and slightly judgmental that we ate our sacrificial blasphemous heretical lamb with green jello. Green jello! We still chuckle and shake our heads whenever we think about his barbaric sheep meat ignorance — not knowing that lamb is eaten with mint jelly.

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I’m over here, day five in this horrible business of being sick. I don’t think anyone quite prepared me fully on how awful a thing it is to be quarantined away from your loved ones — especially the freshly trimmed blondie you spent almost a week away from — or the even more pitiful qualm of needing to be quarantined but cannot be because, well, you’re mom and how else is the laundry going to be folded, runny noses wiped or your little house going to continue chugging along in a somewhat peaceful manner.

Thankfully we’re slowly on the mend and hopefully I won’t be down for much longer. But while I am here, lazily in bed trying to ration out my last few aloe-veraed ultra soft puffs and sip my quickly depleting mug of hot tea I thought I would take a moment to tell you about some really great soup. I think tomato soup is something everyone should have in their arsenal of go-to recipes, which is odd because only recently, err when I made it from scratch, did I ever begin to question the sincerity of my former favorite: condensed tomato soup. Yes, I was a lover of the canned tomato soup — the kind that required two things: water and a bowl. It’s what I grew up on, it’s what I was familiar with and when nostalgia and the only frame of reference to base tomato soup upon is what you like and prefer, well, there’s a phrase: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. To me, it was unbroken. It was what I liked. And though my husband violently opposed such beloved affection I was set out to make him love it.

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I don’t think there will ever be a day when I declare this site biscuit complete. You see, I find myself in somewhat of a predicament every time I make them. My shoulder angel — yes, I’ve got one — tells me you all think like me, you can never have too many biscuit recipes. In fact, there is so much you can do with them it’s practically impossible to find one and declare your search over for the rest of your biscuit eating life. Or my shoulder devil who says people don’t eat biscuits any more. This is a somewhat carb-concious society.* We don’t like filling ourselves with things that we will have to later spend an extra 15 minutes on the treadmill over. Seriously, biscuits are so 1952.

Yeah, this she-devil is weird.

Not only does my shoulder angel always speak sound logic, I also happen to be a bread (okay, carb) fanatic.  I will gladly eat buttermilk honey biscuits, biscuits with salami and scallions, absurdly flaky buttermilk biscuits and creme fraiche biscuits. I could never pass them up. I think everyone should have these tucked away in their recipe box, because I know you too appreciate the nuances between a buttermilk biscuit and a cream biscuit. Us buttery, flaky bread people, we just get it. We get that you can’t have just one biscuit recipe to carry you through chili and a braise and holiday dinners. Each one has a specific time and a specific place.

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I trust you all had wonderful, frisbee throwin’, back deck grillin’, smoked meat chompin’ fun packed yesterday as we celebrated our Independence. Please tell me you partied enough for the both of us, because this year we found our July 4th smack dab between a 64-hour power outage and vacation. To say we didn’t celebrate, would be accurate. Perhaps you heard, if you keep up with weathery news things, that a derecho flew right threw Washington D.C. Friday night at 10:30. PRIME baby-asleep-we-can-party-hardy-all-night-long-for-two-hours-before-hitting-the-sack time. It had us scrambling throughout our half disheveled house (construction finally underway for a pantry, and folks, I’ve been swooning at the single shelf that has been nailed in almost a month ago as things keep delaying further progress, but boy is it a perfect shelf) to find any spare half burnt (read: has the remotest chance of still catching on fire) candles strewn about the house.

It was one of the most random moments of my life. A slightly humid summer evening, with heat lightening in the distance. Muggy, with flicks of yellow amber glowing from lightning bug tushies and the rhythmic chirp from crickets. A slight rustle in the trees as an occasional sticky wind passed through their glossy leaves. No sooner did we schlep ourselves inside, put the baby to bed and sit down to determine how we would spend our last few precious Friday night hours than the storm came raging in full force. I’m pretty sure at one point I saw Toto fly by my bedroom window as I tried to predict which method — the rattling window and wall shaking wind, the lightning strikes eerily too close for comfort or the drenching monsoon tidal wave downpour that joined the assault — would destroy our little home. Then it stopped. Just as quickly as it started. And we were then left in a sans air conditioned, spoiling refrigerator, muggy, sweat house. Also, our house’s windows have no screens, and 92% can’t open either. Not that there was even a remote wind to carry us through the epic heat wave that landed on us exactly as the power grid was wiped blank. We were stuck. In humidness. With a baby. Who doesn’t understand what we mean when we say, “Sorry, honey. I know you’re hot, but we’ve got to keep at least the diaper on.” To boys, birthday suits are the bee’s knees.

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